Budget time? What are your marketing plans?

16 February 2015

Are you in the process of setting your marketing budget for the next financial year? Are you wondering about what you could do to get best value and measure return on investment?

It’s that time of the year when law firms are looking at what they want to invest in to increase business over the next year. Digital marketing has seen massive increases over the last few years, with mobile activity overtaking desktop for the first time at the end of 2014.

With this lean toward increased internet use on mobile, is that going to be one of the key areas you invest in? How about video? What about social?

More than two million legal searches are made on Google every day. So, now is the time to start to think about what is important to your business over the next 12 months, what’s worth investing in, what will be your return on that investment and how you will manage the cost of those items.

We wrote a series of blog posts for Legal Futures on our predictions for 2015, which included video, mobile, content marketing and wearable tech. So, we thought it was worth revisiting the ‘trends’ and giving our top five tips for where you should be putting your marketing money in 2015-16:

Mobile – Making sure your website is mobile-friendly is a given. It is absolutely essential to ensure that your website is responsive to mobile, tablet, phablet and desktop. According to the National Office for Statistics’ 2014 report, 83% of adults go online and 63% use a smartphone. Now though, it’s not just about making sure your website is responsive, it’s about ensuring you have content that is useful for mobile, your interactivity is mobile and your back office supports mobile, both from a customer relationship management perspective and functionality.

Video – This has been growing rapidly and statistics suggest that videos on a website landing page can increase conversions by up to 86%. mmadigital’s Comparemyfirm.com website found that 90% of the top 200 law firms did not have video content on their home page. Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views, with half of these on mobile devices. It’s clear that people consume video regularly online and on mobile and are increasingly more interested in the latest video technology, as has been seen with Go-Pro cameras becoming mainstream and electronics manufacturers showing 4k TVs and video products. With this in mind, upgrading your video to ultra high-resolution 4k will be another area to review and invest in.

Content – The buzzword of content marketing has become very popular, but often people are not fully sure of what it actually means and what value it has to their business. In a nutshell, content/content marketing is any message coming from your business such as a story for your website, posts on social media, video, blogs, PR. The marketing element is making sure that everything you produce has a purpose within your wider business strategy and goals, connecting back to your marketing plan as a whole.

Social media – Creating or investing in social media and your brand’s presence on it is not as easy as setting up your account and off you go, box ticked. Customers are much more savvy to brands and advertising these days, as was recently seen with the US Superbowl – the UK was swept up into the frenzy but the majority based on the adverts and subsequent social interaction rather than on-field action. Social media offers customers an open, instantaneous platform to your brand – in other words it’s all of your customer service interactions playing out in public. Many law firms have been worried about this open platform where you welcome feedback, positive or negative. But you shouldn’t – social media is now as prevalent as website. As long as you have a strategy, reason and point to doing it, it can be of excellent value and benefit for both business-to-customer and business-to-business opportunities.

Employee engagement – This might not seem to be a traditional marketing channel as it’s not as obvious in terms of a customer generator/investment. However, employee engagement should feature in your marketing agenda for 2015. Happy employees = brand ambassadors = customer creators. By investing in the relationship and communications you have within your business you can create natural, genuine brand supporters. People who work for a company they can rely on, trust and believe in are happy to talk about it and that means better recruitment, retention of existing customers and that all-important organic word-of-mouth for new clients. Investing in employee engagement improves customer engagement, therefore customer experience and the opportunity to generate further business.

We hope our top five tips have given you some food for thought on where to direct your marketing investment over the coming year. mmadigital will be hosting a number of roundtable events in 2015 on how to maximise your marketing budget. If you would like to register for information about these events, or would like advice or support on any of the above-mentioned marketing options, feel free to give us a call on 0161 452 0311 or email info@mmadigital.co.uk

Associate News is provided by Legal Futures Associates.
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